“Three.” My heart races. “Two.” Drops of sweat trickle down my face, splashing onto the blades of grass below. “One.” I muster all of my strength to push myself up, plant a cleat in the grass and take off. To my right and left are my teammates, my brothers. Finally crossing the line, I hunch over and place my head between my knees. My ears pound from exhaustion, my legs wobble from fatigue, and that oh so familiar voice booms from the distance “three.” I plummet to the ground, beads of sweat flying off of my face as my fatigued body ricochets off of the grassy soil. My body screams at me to quit, to take a set off, yet my mind beams with passion. This is the pain of hard work. My coaches always stressed that there exists two pains in life: the pain of hard work and the pain of regret. The pain of hard work will eventually fade away; soreness passes as time moves on, and the work becomes easier and easier. Regret, however, lasts for a lifetime. One cannot go back in time to fix something, to make a simple change which would have cascaded into the preferable outcome. The pain of regret is knowing that an extra bit of dedication - that extra rep, extra study problem, or just simply better notes in class - could have led to a much better outcome. The pain of regret is one that is so intense because the only reason one did not succeed is because he or she did not commit themselves enough to the task at hand. This past football season, we strived to proactively replace the pain of regret with the pain of hard work.

Tumwater HS Football Stadium

My summer consisted of early mornings drenched in sweat. Starting at 7:30 AM, and occasionally lasting all the way until 10:30, my teammates and I were pushed to our limit every day. However, we kept coming back. The weight room and subsequent conditioning sessions were so routinely populated that we had to be separated into two groups, one going immediately after the other around 10:00 AM. The reason so many of us pushed through the pain and the soreness, day in and day out? Our coaches believed in us, and we believed in each other. One man, however, is the reason we all pushed ourselves to the limit, refusing to let fatigue take control: Coach McGrath. Coach McGrath would oversee just about every summer training session, holding every single person accountable for their lifts and conditioning. Some may call it tough love, but the passion that Coach McGrath put into each and every player over the summer is the reason that I pushed myself the way I did. There would be times where I could have easily dropped out of a set of sprints, succumbing to the exhaustion which consumed my whole body. It was in these moments that Coach McGrath’s investment in me and my teammates as a whole pushed me to finish, as I could not let him, my teammates, or myself down. This past summer, for the first time I experienced what complete exhaustion feels like. Through these moments of agonizing fatigue, however, I learned about true perseverance and what the pain of hard work truly feels like. I would like to sincerely thank my coaches, namely coach McGrath, for helping me to fully realize this. There truly are two pains in life, and the the pain of hard work is much more preferable to the pain of regret.